Richardson has collaborated with artists such as Alsarah & the Nubatones, Amarcord, Branford Marsalis, Bill Seaman, The Callithumpian Consort, Conrad Tao, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Emmanuel Music, Sinfonia Salt Lake, and yMusic. He has a predilection for violin music, and has been fortunate to work with a variety of violinists including Lilit Hartunian, Sarah Plum, Charlotte Munn-Wood, Sophia Szokolay, Misha Vayman, and Roseminna Watson. His recent commissions include works for Boston Musica Viva, Emmanuel Music, Lamnth, New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, Tanglewood Music Center, and Transient Canvas.
In 2021, Richardson released his debut portrait album, Borne by a Wind, on New Focus Recordings. The record’s cornerstone features Red Wind, a genre-spanning collaboration with poet Nathaniel Mackey and a mixed chamber ensemble of New York-based musicians, and three other chamber works performed by pianist Conrad Tao, violinist Lilit Hartunian, and the Da Capo Chamber Players.
As a theorist, Richardson’s research focuses on aspects of form, gesture, and interdisciplinary relationships between the fields of music, literature, and philosophy. In his article in TEMPO, “Reflections on Form: An Interview with Pascal Dusapin,” he discusses with the composer his idiosyncratic musical style and investigates its connection to Samuel Beckett and Gilles Deleuze. A related article, “Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin’s Quad, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze,” applies analytical tools, derived from Deleuze’s reading of Beckett’s television play Quad and from his collaborations with Félix Guattari, to aspects of texture, gesture, and timbre in Dusapin’s violin concerto Quad (1996). It was published in 2023 in Perspectives of New Music Volume 60, No. 1.
Born and based in Boston, Sid Richardson earned his PhD in the Department of Music at Duke University. He also holds degrees from Boston Conservatory and Tufts University. Sid has participated in artist residencies at Crosstown Arts, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and their satellite campus at Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France. In 2017, The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him a Charles Ives Scholarship. He was the recipient of the 2018 Hermitage Prize from the Aspen Music Festival and School. In the summer of 2019, Richardson was the Elliott Carter Memorial Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Active as a music educator, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Wellesley College, and is a member of the composition faculty at New England Conservatory of Music.